The ultimate guide to Aldo Rossi's postmodernism – an 'architecture of meaning'

The key image of the 1980 Architecture Biennale was Aldo Rossi’s Teatro de Mundo – a tower floating across the Venetian lagoon, a kind of strange dream, half-familiar, half-fantasy. Much like the city itself, it summons an impossible architecture shimmering on the water; floating, fleeting, unforgettable.

The subtitle of the Biennale (the important global architecture festival's very first iteration) was ‘The Presence of the Past’, and you might use that phrase to encapsulate the work of the Italian architect Aldo Rossi (1931-97). He created an architecture redolent of history, rich with memory and association, and yet one which was never imitative or pastiche. He refined design into a series of motifs or archetypes that were almost universal markers of the European Renaissance city, which were so abstracted that they evoked rather than reproduced.

Architecture in Aldo Rossi's words

‘One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people,’ he wrote in his 1966 book The Architecture of the City – 'and like memory, it is associated with objects and places. The city is the locus of the collective memory. This relationship between the locus and the citizenry then becomes the city’s predominant image, both of architecture and of landscape and as certain artefacts become part of its memory, new ones emerge.’

Aldo Rossi's postmodernism

‘The Architecture of the City’ became a key text of postmodernism that would reach its zenith at the 1980 Venice Biennale, yet Rossi was little concerned with many of the themes of classicism, historicism and style with which PoMo became indelibly associated. Rossi was a Marxist who believed that the city is formed by political and social forces and that modernism had by then been co-opted by capital to destroy the traditional city as a place of memory and strip it of any meaning beyond finance.

This desire to reintroduce meaning, to re-enchant the city and to use architecture to acknowledge the deep collective memory of urban elements (almost as if the metropolis were a stage set) led to an extraordinary oeuvre which defies easy definition. His early Gallaratese social housing project in his native Milan (1969-72) might look like a conventional functionalist block, but look closer and it appears abstracted, attenuated, as if Giorgio de Chirico had designed public housing, with its dark arcades and striking shadows, its stagey flatness and the historical proportions of its otherwise plain elevations.

San Cataldo Cemetery

One of Rossi’s most haunting and enduring works was the San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena (from 1971). With an eerily empty punctured red cube at its centre and a representation of the cemetery as a literal city of the dead, this was an attempt to revive modernist architecture through meaning and memory.

His drawings from the project, which encompassed plan, perspective, elevation, representation and abstraction, are among the most influential renderings of the 20th century. It famously evokes the work of philosophers and architects such as Michel Foucault, Étienne-Louis Boullée, and Jeremy Bentham – classicism, modernism and rationalism – in a quite magical combination.

From product to architecture

From there, Rossi went global, building everywhere from Los Angeles (Disney HQ) to Fukuoka via Manhattan. Arguably, his most popular work was not a building at all but his designs for coffee pots for Alessi. Approached by the Italian manufacturer as it was shifting from kitchenware to high design, Rossi produced the Tea and Coffee Piazza and the Conica and Cupola stovetop espresso makers. The moka pots, those quintessential components of Italian domestic culture, are reinterpreted as elements in a classical city, stage props in an idea of ideal urban archetypes. His work for furniture manufacturer Molteni & C was equally imaginative, including the 'Piroscafo’ bookcase with its bold, blocky outline. Then those same motifs reappeared in architecture. His Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht (1995) features a similar cupola to the coffee maker, for instance.

Rossi’s posthumous store for publisher Scholastic in New York’s SoHo (2001, designed with Morris Adjmi) is a masterpiece of urban infill. A tall, narrow loft building, it builds on the neighbourhood’s traditions of iron-framed architecture but borrows its stripped columns from rationalist architect Giuseppe Terragni and its red-painted steel beams from Manhattan engineering. The frontage is classical-inflected, the rear is industrial, looking as if it's made of old stacked cranes. There are few better buildings of the era in the city. Scholastic was an evolution of the language employed at the Il Palazzo Hotel in Fukuoka (1987), a piece of Italian classical hyper-urbanism amid the low-rise of the Japanese waterfront.

Aldo Rossi's legacy

There were dozens of other buildings, from his remarkable restoration of the Teatro Carlo Fenice in Genoa to his extensive work in Berlin via his distinctive stage sets. There is also one of the first contemporary memorials, the striking, Platonic-solid monument to Santo Pertini in Milan and the unfinished Piazza Nova in Perugia.

His vivid, scribbled sketches, skilfully coloured and almost cartoonishly archetypal, also influenced a generation of architects, just as critical as his buildings. He would sometimes mix his designs up, gathering them into a cluster on the page like a dense urban island of Rossi dreams, just as he did with his coffee piazza.

Rossi died suddenly in a car crash en route to his weekend home at Lago Maggiore, aged only 66. He left behind a legacy still being pored over, an oeuvre which forms a kind of collective memory of the city in itself.

Aldo Rossi's key projects

Gallaratese Quarter

Where: Milan, Italy
When: 1969-72

When architect Carlo Aymonino started working on the designs for an affordable housing complex commissioned by the City of Milan in 1967, he commissioned Aldo Rossi to design one of the five buildings in the Monte Amiata housing complex, located in the Gallaratese neighbourhood in northwest Milan.

San Cataldo Cemetery

Where: Modena, Italy
When: 1971

Rossi's San Cataldo Aldo Rossi Metropolitan Cemetery came to complete a site with buildings originally created by architect Cesare Costa between 1858 and 1876.

Tea and Coffee Piazza for Alessi

When: 1983

Italian company Alessi invited eleven architects to design a silver coffee and tea service in 1979. The results included Aldo Rossi's set which imagines the items as buildings in a miniature city.

Il Palazzo Hotel

Where: Fukuoka, Japan
When: 1989

When it first opened, Rossi’s Hotel Il Palazzo symbolised a new epoch in Japan, merging Eastern and Western design values, even being referred to as Japan’s first boutique hotel.

Parigi armchair

When: 1991

Designed by Rossi for UniFor in 1989 and released two years later, the Parigi armchair is now an icon of postmodernist product design.

Piroscafo bookcase for Molteni & C

When: 1991

The ‘Piroscafo’ bookcase (from £3,315) by Aldo Rossi and Luca Meda, was recently reissued in a warm spice colour by Molteni & C

Bonnefanten Museum

Where: Maastricht, The Netherlands
When: 1995

The Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, Netherlands is an important institution for fine and contemporary art in the province of Limburg. Design by Aldo Rossi, the building features a landmark cupola, and now forms an important Maastricht landmark.

Scholastic HQ

Where: New York, USA
When: 2001

The Scholastic Corporation's headquarters in New York was designed as a collaboration between Aldo Rossi and Morris Adjimi, and completed posthumously.